The Academic Exchange What prompted you to draft the resolution?

Professor Harvey Klehr I was both concerned and angry about what had happened on two grounds. First, it was just the whole process, which I thought was simply a huge error. When Steve Sanderson announced his resignation, I assumed that there would be a search committee and an announcement about somebody becoming interim dean. Then the provost circulated a memo saying some people had talked about combining the positions of the graduate and undergraduate deans, and asking for people to write in with input. I sent her a fairly long message about what a terrible mistake I thought that would be, and why. A number of other faculty sent the same kind of memo emphasizing different points. We didn’t hear anything for a while, then suddenly a memo saying, Here it is, we’ve reorganized—in effect, a very important decision had been made without the opportunity for the faculty to discuss it or argue about it.

I also thought the substantive issues were significant. I was hearing things which suggested to me that one of the reasons this was being done was the feeling on the part of some people that too much attention was being paid to undergraduate education at the expense of graduate education.

There’s inherently a conflict between graduate and undergraduate education in an institution. That’s not to say that there are not also lots of points at which they are in congruence and support each other, but there also are fault lines. The most obvious, I think, is simply that graduate education is very expensive, both in terms of faculty time and in terms of money. The graduate school doesn’t pay for itself, and it can’t. So graduate education in effect has to be subsidized, and it is subsidized by undergraduates. It’s something that’s necessary. The question is, how do you strike the balance? And my own opinion is that many American universities strike it in ways that I find offensive. Particularly at large state universities, graduate education is subsidized by enormous undergraduate classes that are then broken down with tas and lots of courses being taught by graduate students—cheap academic labor. There are other, private universities where undergraduate education is in a way an afterthought, and the university defines itself in terms of its graduate programs.

I’ve thought for a long time that Emory is one of the relatively few schools that has an appropriate kind of balance—that is, we have graduate programs that are not enormous. They’re not the tail that wags the dog. Undergraduate education is taken very seriously here in a way that it’s not in a lot of American universities. You’re going to have conflict inevitably between graduate and undergraduate education, and that’s good. I don’t see any problem with the dean of the graduate school, for example, arguing for more resources, knowing that those resources are going to come at some cost to undergraduate education, but at least then you have a dean of the college who also is defending undergraduate education. I was afraid that if there were one dean or executive vice provost with one budget, the conflicts would not be aired. They would be decided without open debate and argument.

AE Why do you think this happened now?

HK This is something I’m just not sure about. I’ve been at Emory for thirty years. When I came there were a group of senior faculty who really were faculty leaders everybody looked to. As the 1970s went on, those people retired and died, and the institution began to change fundamentally from being a regional, primarily liberal arts college with a very small graduate presence to what it is today. Huge numbers of faculty were brought in. As lots of people have pointed out, there was a period in the eighties and into the nineties when we didn’t have clear faculty leadership. Part of it was simply that so many faculty really didn’t have a sense that this was their institution. Part of it was that we didn’t have faculty who had been here for a lengthy period of time and had grown up with the institution and whom other faculty looked to for leadership. Maybe this episode shows that the faculty has matured, and that’s a natural process.

AE What would you like to see result?

HK I would like to see the college and the graduate school remain independent. That’s not to say that there may not need to be some restructuring about the way they work together and cooperate. But I think it’s imperative to continue to have separate deans of the college and the graduate school with independent budgetary authority. I think we have to continue to strengthen both. For practical and educational and deeply ideological reasons, I think the college has to remain the crown jewel for the university. Yes, graduate programs need to be strengthened, but it can’t be at the expense of the college. At all costs that has to be protected. Among other things, if we don’t protect the college, we’re not going to be able to do anything. That’s what pays the bills.